Henry Charles Taylor was born on a farm in Van Buren County, Iowa, on April 16, 1873, the son of Tarpley Early and Elmira Martin Taylor. He attended the school in his home community and, from 1891 to 1893, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. In 1896 he received a B.A. degree from Iowa State College at Ames. At the University of Wisconsin, he earned his M.A. in 1898 and his Ph.D. in 1902, having also studied one term at the London School of Economics in 1899, Halle-Wittenberg University in 1900, and the University of Berlin in 1900-1901.
At the turn of the century agricultural economics was just beginning to be recognized as a distinct field of study. Taylor's first appointment was at the University of Wisconsin in 1901 as an instructor in commerce; but gradually he became more associated with agriculture and in 1908 he was appointed chairman of the newly-created Department of Agricultural Economics, the first such department to be established in the United States. In 1919 he left Wisconsin to become chief of the Office of Farm Management in the United States Department of Agriculture where he had an opportunity to apply his theories of agricultural economics. While continuing his work in this office, Taylor also served one year as chief of the Bureau of Markets and Crop Estimates. The two divisions were eventually combined in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics which Taylor headed from 1922 to 1925. During these years Taylor gave new stimulus to the economic research work in these government organizations, coordinated the marketing work with problems of production and farm management, revised the work in crop estimates, and negotiated agreements between the Department of Agriculture and nine European cotton associations for the establishment of universal standards for American cotton.
After leaving the department in 1925 Taylor served as research associate in the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities and as professor of economics at Northwestern University. In 1928 he became director of a comprehensive survey of rural Vermont for the Vermont Commission on Country Life. With the completion of this report in 1931 he joined the Laymen's Foreign Mission inquiry, a group made up of Protestant laymen that was underwritten by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In this position Taylor studied and reported on the work of agricultural missionaries in India, China, and Japan.
In 1933 President Roosevelt appointed Taylor to the Committee of the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome. This agency worked to collect and disseminate agricultural information on a world-wide basis. In 1935, after serving one year as president of the thirteenth general assembly of the institute, Taylor returned to the United States to become director of the Farm Foundation, an organization set up to manage funds to promote the improvement of rural living conditions. In 1945 he retired but began work on a history of agricultural economics sponsored by the Farm Foundation. Taylor completed this project at age 80 in 1952. In subsequent years Taylor continued to be an active researcher, and he was still carrying out research for a book at the time of his death, April 9, 1969.
Taylor was married to Elizabeth Bruner in 1904 and in 1941 to Anne Dewees, a graduate of the UW Library School. He was survived by his daughter, Esther Taylor (born 1908).
Henry C. Taylor published very extensively during his career. Among his books were An Introduction to the Study of Agricultural Economics (1905), the first American textbook in the field of agricultural economics; Agricultural Economics (1919); World Trade in Agricultural Products (1943); The Story of Agricultural Economics in the United States, 1840-1932 (1952); and Tarpleywick: A Century of Iowa Farming (1970).
